The use of large balers, particularly large rectangular balers, to package hay or straw into large bales of the forage or bedding material, enables the producer of the bales to more easily transport the large rectangular bales for sale in the marketplace. The large rectangular bales of hay or straw are typically sized to fit on the bed of a tractor trailer for shipment of large quantities of the forage or bedding material from the site at which the forage crop was grown to the location where the forage crop can be sold in the marketplace. Large rectangular bales will typically weigh between 600 to 900 pounds and, as a result, require mechanization to handle the bales, either to place them on the trailer for transport, or to move them from one trailer to another.
Small rectangular bales of hay or straw will typically weigh between 40 and 60 pounds and, accordingly, can be handled manually without requiring any mechanization to load or unload the small rectangular bales. However, the time required to load a trailer with small rectangular bales is substantially longer than the time required to load a trailer with large rectangular, or even round, bales by using loader mechanization to position the bales on the trailer. As a result, the popularity of placing forage or bedding material, including hay and straw, into large, highly compressed packages has increased. Nevertheless, many consumers of baled forage or bedding materials prefer to have the small rectangular bales in order to facilitate handling at the time of distributing the forage or bedding material to the animals.
It would be desirable to provide a device for reconstructing a large rectangular bale of forage or bedding material into a plurality of small rectangular bales that can be manually handled. It would also be desirable to provide a device that would be operable to disintegrate a large rectangular bale into a stream of loose forage or bedding material that can be fed to a conventional small rectangular baler. It would also be desirable to provide a method of repackaging large rectangular bales of forage or bedding material into small rectangular bales of forage material.